My take on the commodity supercycle and stock market zeitgeist...and the new era of precious metals, uranium (just bottoming, btw)and alternate energy. As I have said here since 2005 "Get ready for peak everything, the repricing of the planet and "black swan" markets all over the place".

12 May 2009

Gordon Brown Spills the Beans on the IMF

Michael Hudson tells us more about Icland, the UK the IMF and the bailouts.

This shows how urgently Iceland needs to straighten out its banking mess and restructure the economy to free the population from the unique debt squeeze its laws and a decade of neoliberal mismanagement have created. Now that the banks have been de-privatized and taken back into the public domain, credit needs to be turned back into what it was before – a public utility. But this cannot be organized without knowing how much can be recovered from the failed banks to back domestic depositors. And the reports from the British accounting consultancy firms still have not been made public. Only the major creditors have received copies!

Remarkably, the government said last week that they might not be released at all. The inference is that the crooked dealing has been so damning to vested Icelandic interests that it would cause a new political crisis to resolve the deepening economic crisis. The fear is that a sweetheart deal has been made with the kleptocrats whose reckless behavior (and it seems probable, illegitimate bank maneuverings with offshore accounts) plunged the economy into negative equity in the first place. The better the financial health of the failed banks appears on paper, the more presumably will be left over to pay foreigners – including the offshore accounts of the banks’ former owners in their own dealings with the banks. So from the vantage point of Icelandic depositors and debtors to these banks, a realistic pessimistic estimate of the banks’ position would protect them, while an unrealistic optimism would enable foreigners to siphon off much more money, leaving less for Iceland.

In fact, the IMF has failed to oblige Iceland’s government to conform to the Letter of Intent it signed on November 15, 2008. This letter obliged Iceland to “bring loan values in line with expected market values” (#4), and to “include an assessment of whether or not managers and major shareholders have mismanaged or abused the banks” (#6). No such assessment has been made, and as described above, loan values are exceeding market values by a rising degree as property, businesses and households fall into negative equity status.

The Icelandic government’s agreement with the IMF promised to make the bank assessments public upon their completion “by end-march 2009” (#10). This has not been done – perhaps (one worries) because the next sentence says that the government “will discuss in advance with IMF staff any changes to the adopted strategy.” In view of the secrecy that now shrouds the events that pushed the banks under, one can only wonder at what developments have prompted the government and IMF to change strategy.

What the IMF did demand – as it always does – is that once the government bails out the bankers for their bad loans, the whole privatization process is to start all over again, paving the groundwork for yet new rip-offs. In view of the fact that “the banking crisis will significantly constrain the public sector and burden the public for years to come” as the government pays off bad loans (#12), the agreement pledges (#14) that “A significant reduction in government debt through the sale of the government’s stake in the new banks could help reduce the needed fiscal adjustment over the medium term.”

Belatedly, the population is now up in arms – two weeks after the election! To stabilize the currency, Iceland has agreed to IMF conditionalities that prevent the government from pursuing the counter-cyclical Keynesian fiscal policy that Mr. Obama is leading in the United States. Unless the debt pressure is alleviated, Icelandic homeowners and businesses will be obliged to run down their savings each month until they are depleted – at which time they will lose their homes and forfeit their businesses to foreclosing creditors.

So on Saturday afternoon, May 9, a “pots and pans” protest was conducted outside of Iceland’s Parliament in Reykjavik. The scenario is much like that of the color revolutions staged by U.S. neoliberals throughout the post-Soviet states. But Iceland’s kitchen-utensil revolution is organized as a protest against neoliberal policies. The protesters have picked up the thread where it left off last October a similar set of protests dislodged the Independence Party from power. The National Labor Association has broken from the new Social Democratic coalition government, reflecting the growing anger among Icelanders at their debt squeeze.

Mr. Brown’s statement that he intends to use IMF leverage to deepen Iceland’s debt position by forcing its government to bail out British depositors has rubbed salt in this wound – precisely by demanding for his country what Icelanders are not receiving from their government! Its citizens want to know what pressure the country is responding to if it intends to put the interest of foreigners before their own. This double standard has motivated the population to act in a more confrontational way than would have occurred had the problem been merely domestic. Icelanders want to be told the magnitude of the financial problem – and apparent dishonesty and crony dealings – that the government is keeping secret. The answer may at long last move Iceland out of its post-feudal oligarchy. Its neoliberal privatizations and pro-financial policies may turn out not to be as entrenched and irreversible as the kleptocrats had hoped would be the case.

Michael Hudson is a former Wall Street economist. A Distinguished Research Professor at University of Missouri, Kansas City (UMKC), he is the author of many books, including Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire (new ed., Pluto Press, 2002) He can be reached via his website, mh@michael-hudson.com

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If you desire great things, do not attempt to lay hold of them with little effort; but give up some things entirely, and postpone others for the present.

Epictetus

The first and greatest victory is to conquer yourself; to be conquered by yourself is of all things most shameful and vile.

Plato

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George Orwell

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What we now suffer in economics is a hardness of intellect, a meanness of spirit, a narrowness of vision and a rigidity of thinking that utterly distorts the role of what economics in our society should be. Instead of economics being our tool for societal advancement, happiness, health, and sustainability, the profession has lost its way in econometrics, neo-liberal cant and equlibrium theory. It has become little more than cheerleaders to our enslavement to a towering edifice of debt, consumption and greed and the mouthpiece of vested interests. Unless repudiated we face not only economic but soceitial and ecological collapse. KMcKern ~ News Kontent